This chapter discusses the emergence of the Cold War, the containment policy, and the Cold War consensus (and its challenges) that were developed against the expansion of international communism.

This chapter analyzes the Reagan administrations realist and Cold War foreign policy approach and the realist/idealist approach of the George H.W. Bush administration as the Cold War was ending.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

This chapter discusses the efforts of Congress to reassert its constitutional prerogatives in foreign policy, its relative success in this area, and its efforts to engage more fully with the president.

This chapter focuses primarily on the Department of State and the National Security Council in foreign policy making, and also outlines the key role of several economic departments in that process.

This chapter discusses the role of political parties and interest groups in affecting the direction of foreign policy, with a focus on the erosion of bipartisanship and the influence of ethnic groups.

This chapter assesses the role of the Department of Defense, intelligence community, and Department of Homeland Security in foreign policy as well as the coordination mechanisms across bureaucracies.

Introduction

Although it has so far only been touched upon, the question of how African-American writers have used ekphrastic techniques to negotiate images of slavery is a large one that deserves to be addressed not only at greater length but also and more specifically with regard to the ‘peculiar institution’ of American slavery itself. The exploration of this issue begins in this chapter, which brings together and considers a suite of texts from four authors – John Edgar Wideman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey and Terrance Hayes. Even as these figures are all well-known and indeed preeminent within the field of African-American letters, the texts themselves (like much of the material covered earlier) have been almost entirely overlooked.

1. From Sights to Sounds: John Edgar Wideman's ‘Listening’

The first text in this ekphrastic mini-gallery is Wideman's ‘Listening’, a two-page prose sketch described by Jeffrey Renard Allen as a ‘brilliant riff’ (93) on William Sidney Mount's Bar-Room Scene (1835) (Fig. 5.1). Wideman's text was originally published in 1994 in Edward Hirsch's Transforming Vision: Writers on Art, a multigeneric assemblage of writings based on the holdings of the Art Institute of Chicago, which include paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings and photographs. It takes its place within Hirsch's collection as one of just four African-American pieces out of forty-six contributions overall, with the others being from Robert Hayden, Rita Dove and Charles Johnson.

As Wideman explains, at the time of working on this commission he is in Maine rather than Chicago itself and so obliged to compose his text at one remove, simulating the experience of a museum visit by perusing a copy of Master Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago, and it is in this glossy and expensively produced volume that he encounters Mount's painting, a work which, as he remarks, he had not seen previously. This sense of dislocation from and externality to the museum is as much symbolic as geographical, since, apart from in Mount's picture itself, the tome Wideman inspects contains, as he points out, virtually no other images of African-descended people with whom he can identify. This being so, it is no surprise that he should be attracted to Bar-Room Scene, as it provides an intriguing study in the seemingly intransigent realities of racial inclusion and exclusion.

Approaching the Masculine in Hemingway's Fiction

As we have already seen, revisionary scholarship from feminist and queer studies has gone a long way to disrupt the so-called Hemingway myth. The author's love of big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing, bullfighting, and boxing contributed to an exaggerated image of the man that his unmatched celebrity as a writer surely compounded. Hemingway rose to fame amid a burgeoning culture of celebrity worship, and, in a manner that rivals the acumen of today's social media influencer, Hemingway leaned into his macho persona in order to capitalize on his growing reputation. In 1935, after The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms catapulted the author to fame, Hemingway would write an “absolutely true” account of his African safari with Pauline to see whether it could “compete with a work of the imagination.” But the narrative mostly serves to demonstrate, in general, that Hemingway's self-discipline makes him a superior writer and that, when applied to the hunt, his self-discipline results in a higher number of quality kills, allowing him to win favor with the white hunter and native trackers, all of whom are experts at their trade. In this sense, Green Hills of Africa can be framed as an adventure narrative that compares itself against works of the imagination to underscore the grandiose nature of the hunt. Hemingway boldly asserts the veracity of the tale to fortify his masculine public image. To a remarkable degree, it would seem that Green Hills of Africa is geared toward self-promotion.

But as revisionary critics have repeatedly pointed out, Hemingway's literary treatment of masculinity is far more nuanced than the cultural stereotype of masculinity, tending to focus on male vulnerability rather than male bravado. Even Green Hills of Africa betrays the Hemingway myth at times, presenting manhood as a burden with occasionally toxic effects. Throughout the narrative, the kills are presented as thinly veiled phallic symbols: sometimes Hemingway takes pride in the size of his beast, asserting its superiority over the smaller kills of his opponent Karl, and at other times he feels ashamed of its comparatively small stature.

An Introduction

Ernest Hemingway has long been considered either a nihilist or a secular existentialist. “A vast number of critics,” writes Joseph Prud’homme, “have deemed Ernest Hemingway a nihilist. As an individual, they contend, Hemingway spurned religious truth and espoused absurdist nihilism… . The art and artist express the same worldview.” Robert Penn Warren writes that Hemingway's protagonist in the 1933 short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is “obsessed by … the meaninglessness of the world, by nothingness, by nada.” William Bache likewise asserts that the story's protagonist represents a “nihilistic way of life.” And Judith P. Saunders argues that the story's protagonist experiences “existential panic” in the face of his mortality when confronted with the old man's suicide. She says that his “cynical parody” of two Roman Catholic prayers—the Hail Mary and the paternoster—is “insistently blasphemous.” But existentialist interpretations of Hemingway's fiction extend far beyond “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” One can look to a handful of his better-known short stories—like “The Killers,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—to see that Hemingway at the very least sympathized with an existentialist worldview. As Warren states elsewhere, “The typical Hemingway hero is the man aware, or in the process of becoming aware, of nada.” Hemingway's own confrontation with mortality, meaninglessness, and the freedom to make of this life whatever one chooses profoundly shaped his worldview, and you can see this influence throughout his body of work. As José Antonio Gurpegui notes in Hemingway and Existentialism, a search of the combined “words ‘Hemingway’ and ‘existentialism’ in Google showed 354.000 results on August 2013.” As of December 2022, that number has grown to 481,000.

Writing decades apart, Ben Stoltzfus and John Killinger take an existentialist interpretation of Hemingway's fiction a step further. As an unbeliever, Hemingway was not a Kierkegaardian existentialist, but neither would he align himself with Nietzsche, despite the considerable overlap in their views. Rather, Hemingway's own brand of existentialism resembled that of his contemporary, the twentieth-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Like Sartre, Hemingway did not believe in God or a spiritual afterlife.

There Are No Happy Endings

Hemingway's animalization of human beings follows his war-time observations of dead and dying soldiers, none of whom exited the world in a dignified way. As a young ambulance driver, Hemingway was shaken by the grotesque manner in which both soldiers and civilians were killed; he was likewise disturbed by the process undergone by their decaying bodies. As discussed at length in Chapters 1 and 2 of this book, Hemingway was raised as a devout Congregationalist in the tight-knit community of Oak Park, so when he saw that God's beloved creatures, who were made in his image for a special purpose, could themselves rot above ground without proper ceremony, he realized that human beings are inherently no different from the cargo mules drowned at Smyrna. Both animals and humans (an animal species themselves) end up in the same place, and, in this sense, they are equals, he reasoned; there is no hierarchy of value. By the time Hemingway wrote Death in the Afternoon, the concept of negative equality had already taken hold of the writer, as we see in his sardonic appraisal of Mungo Park, the traveler and natural theologian. At some point in his discussion with the old lady, Hemingway tells her a story about a monogamous bull who is sent to the ring and deemed useless after he stops mating with the entire herd. The old lady calls it a “sad story,” and Hemingway replies:

Introduction

The visual work that anchors this chapter is David Martin's Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (Fig. 4.1). This picture presents the touching image of the mixed-race Dido and her white cousin enclosed in the grounds of Kenwood House and, at first glance at least, in contrast to the other visual materials discussed so far in this book, appears to have nothing to do with the baleful realities of slavery or the Middle Passage. As it turns out, however, the opposite is the case: Dido was the illegitimate daughter of Captain John Lindsay and an African woman whom, it is thought, Lindsay took from a Spanish slave ship while serving as a naval officer in the Caribbean during the Seven Years’ War. The painting's connection to the slave trade deepens and ramifies when it is recalled that Lindsay was the nephew of Lord Mansfield, who, as well as being Kenwood's owner when the painting was commissioned, had been long established as Lord Chief Justice of England, presiding over a number of important legal cases concerning slavery in the years prior to the abolitionist campaign. The first was that of the fugitive slave James Somerset, which was heard in 1772, and the second that of the Zong, some eleven years later. Portrait of Dido is thus circuitously linked by the latter case to The Slave Ship and has been thoroughly explored in relation to its highly charged historical and political context by a number of critics. The painting has also surfaced amid the realms of popular culture, both providing the inspiration for and featuring in Amma Asante's Belle (2014), a cinematic reworking of Dido's story for a mainstream audience. But as well as giving rise to Asante's film, the picture has prompted a number of ekphrastic responses over the last twenty-five years or so, which have not attracted critical interest. This chapter is devoted to three of these: Leonora Brito's ‘Dido Elizabeth Belle – A Narrative of Her Life (Extant)’ (1995); Emma Donoghue's ‘Dido’ (2002); and, rather more recently, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's ‘Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, Free Mulatto, and her White Cousin, the Lady Elizabeth Murray, Great-Nieces of William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench’ (2020).